The behavior pattern left the research literature in the early nineties, once its link to heart disease failed to replicate. The pattern itself, speed, impatience, perfectionism, drivenness, hostility, did not go away. Smith and Bryant asked whether it still explains something: not how long people live, but how much they enjoy their own time off.
The impatient, and for a traceable reason. In survey data from seven hundred and sixty-four people, higher Type A impatience in social situations predicted significantly less vacation enjoyment. It also predicted less memory building and less counting of blessings, and more . Those three responses mediated the link, together accounting for eighty-five percent of the total effect.
The Type A behavior pattern left the research literature for a specific reason: studies of it ceased in the early nineteen nineties because its connections with heart disease failed to replicate. Smith and Bryant take the pattern of speed, impatience, perfectionism, drivenness and hostility and ask a different question with it, about the subjective quality of life rather than its length.
Their hypothesis has two parts. Type A behavior undermines the enjoyment of leisure time, and it does so through savoring responses that hamper enjoyment. The test is self-report survey data from seven hundred and sixty-four people.
All of it confirmed. Higher levels of Type A impatience in social situations predicted significantly less vacation enjoyment. Social impatience also predicted lower levels of memory building and counting blessings, and higher levels of kill-joy thinking, as responses to vacation experiences, and each of those in turn predicted less enjoyment. Variations in the three savoring responses significantly mediated the link, and together explained eighty-five percent of the total effect of impatience on enjoyment.
Two further details sharpen the picture. Type A impatience predicted kill-joy thoughts about how the vacation could have been better, but not thoughts about other things one ought to be doing instead. The authors read that split as perfectionism rather than time urgency. And moderated the effect, weakening the negative relationship between impatience and enjoyment. Type A behavior, the authors conclude, has implications for the quality of people’s lives if not the quantity.
wat. Two people take the same holiday. The one tallying how it could have been better gets less out of it, and that accounts for most of the gap.
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The mechanism is specific enough to act on. What spoils the holiday is not the impatience itself but three habits of attention that go with it.
How do we know?
Self-report survey data from seven hundred and sixty-four respondents, testing whether savoring responses mediate the relationship between Type A behavior and the enjoyment of leisure time.
What is still unknown
Self-report throughout, and cross-sectional, so the mediation here is statistical rather than traced over time. The vacation is recalled rather than observed.
Learn something?
Where to next
How long does the good of a long holiday last once you are back?vacation
Does a vacation with meditation in it leave anything behind once you are home?vacation
Why does telling a festival story together change the memory of it?wellbeing